Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga

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The Nature of the Heart and the Life-Force and Their Spiritual Fulfilment

Just as the intellect seeks abstraction, the heart and life-energy want to experience the reality in palpable terms. They are unable to grasp abstraction; they want to have the concrete experience and have it express itself through and in the life.

The Taittiriya Upanishad has an interesting passage wherein it distinguishes between those who focus on the abstract and the austere way of abandonment of the life for union with the Absolute versus those who focus on the realisation in the manifested universe: “One becometh as the unexisting, if he know the Eternal as negation; but if one knoweth of the Eternal that He is, then men know him for the saint and the one reality.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, Taittiriya Upanishad, Brahmanandavalli, ch. 6, pg. 270)

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Nor is it the satisfaction of an abstract mind or impersonal existence to which they respond, but the joy and the activity of a being, a conscious Person in us, whether finite or infinite, to whom the delights and powers of his existence are a reality. Therefore when the heart and life turn towards the Highest and the Infinite, they arrive not at an abstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana, but at an existent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness, but at a conscious Being, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a purely impersonal delight of the Is, but at an infinite I Am of bliss, an Anandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose his consciousness and bliss in featureless existence, but must insist on all three in one, for delight of existence is their highest power and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed. That is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest Indian religion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Three: The Yoga of Divine Love, Chapter 5, The Divine Personality, pp. 554-555